Electric Vehicles, Electric Lights and iPhones

When new technologies compete, what tips the scale toward one or the other?

Maggie Koerth-Baker wrote a terrific article in the New York
Times, Why Your Car
Isn't Electric, which captures some of the social
dimensions of technological innovation by looking at the dominance
and demise of the electric vehicle in the first decade of the 20th
century. If only inventors, entrepreneurs, and policy makers could
spare the time to consider these dimensions before rushing off to
change the world.

In 1900, the technology of the automobile was far from certain -
the steam engine and electric motor were front-runners - yet,
within the first decade, the field had essentially aligned around
the internal combustion engine. Looking back, it's stunning how
such a momentous decision could emerge so quickly. But it's
not much different, perhaps, than the emergence of the smartphone
and its industry structure in the first decades of 21st century (or
the PC in the 1980s).

Koerth-Baker asks: "Why doesn't the best technology always win?"
Part of the answer is that there is no such thing as best, because
that requires us all to agree on a single dimension of quality. The
adoption of electric vehicles stalled due to some earlier and
visible failures, but also because the cost and weight of batteries
was the same problem then as today. But part of the answer is that,
once you get out of the lab, innovation doesn't exist in a
technical vacuum.

Consider a famous example - the QWERTY keyboard, which we are so
familiar with and which was originally and intentionally designed
to slow our typing speeds (in order to prevent the mechanical keys
from jamming). Economist Paul David used this example to describe
how path dependence - essentially the co-evolution of social,
technical, and cognitive infrastructure (not his words) - creates
efficiencies that are more powerful than any one alone.

In this case, the rise of typing schools (a social institution)
and the practice of touch-typing (a cognitive one) committed to the
QWERTY layout, producing yet faster typists than other layouts sans
dedicated schools and typists.

Once we get comfortable with using a new technology in a
particular way, we are reluctant to give it up. David Kirsch,
author of the great book, "The Electric Vehicle and the
Burden of History," recognizes the same challenge for
potential adopters of the electric car today:

"Part of what makes infrastructure is its invisibility… When we
have to create infrastructure for ourselves - installing charging
stations at our houses, for instance - we make the invisible
visible. It becomes an overwhelming task, like having to remake the
world. Most people just want a car."

The challenge, then and now, is how to design new technologies
in ways that tap, or co-opt, this existing infrastructure and offer
little or no technical, social, or cognitive "switching costs." As
I've written
elsewhere, Edison pursued this strategy in getting his
customers (and investors and regulators) to accept his new system
of electric lighting. Indeed, when he set out to improve the
electric light and make it a commercial success, he wrote in his
notebook:

"Object, Edison to effect exact imitation of all done by
gas, so as to replace lighting by gas, by lighting by
electricity."

He went so fast as to hobble the new technology to make it
appear as much like the old as possible - introducing a 13-watt
bulb despite having developed brighter ones because the gas lamp
burned equivalently dim. A positive review in
the New York Times said that, from the street, you could not tell
whether a room was lit by electricity or gas.

This is, of course, also the reason that Google's Android and
Samsung's designs hewed so closely to the iPhone they followed. It
was essential that their smartphone designs, and the applications
it supported, represented as little change to the existing
technical, social, and cognitive aspects of what it wanted to
displace. For customers to accept it, for the mobile carriers, and
for the developers of apps, it had to look as similar to what came
before as possible.

One lesson of the EV, the electric light, and the iPhone is that
the best path towards disruptive innovations may sometimes lie in
pursuing those strategies that seem the least disruptive, at
least in the beginning, to the existing technical, social, and even
cognitive dimensions of any existing systems.

Part of Series

Andrew Hargadon is the Charles J. Soderquist Chair in Entrepreneurship and Professor of Technology Management at the Graduate School of Management at University of California, Davis. Hargadon's research focuses on the effective management of innovation, particularly sustainable innovation, and he is author of numerous articles, essays, and the book How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate (Harvard Business School Press).